About the Center

The Center of Excellence’s mission is to be strategic partners with cross-functional teams to collaborate on and create a human-centered design.

We aim to drive the creation of products and services that delight customers because they are useful, intuitive, effective and desirable. Our goal is to be a user experience leader across our peer institutions.

What is User or Customer Experience?

User experience (UX) is a user-centered design process that focuses on having a deep understanding of users’ wants and needs, values, abilities and limitations.

The Nielsen Norman Group—a leading user experience firm with global experience—defines UX as:

“All aspects of the user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”

The origin of the term UX means to describe the end to end experience user interaction with the company over time. Today, the term customer experience (CX) has been used to describe this lifetime relationship instead of UX.

Whether it's called UX or CX, the Center of Excellence is here to facilitate these processes through partnership, framework and governance.

Defining Usability

Usability refers to the degree that a product is easy for users to achieve their objectives through with efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction, whether it’s hardware, websites or applications. A product that’s efficient determines how fast an experienced user can accomplish tasks, while effectiveness is the amount of effort and understanding it takes for the user to understand the navigation or architecture of the product.

Another usability attribute is that the interface should be easy to recall for future visits with a minimal learning curve.